BURNS, Ken(neth Lauren) 1953-

PERSONAL: Born July 29, 1953, in Brooklyn, New York; son of Robert Kyle (an anthropology professor) and Lyla (a homemaker; maiden name, Tupper) Burns; married Amy Stechler (a filmmaker and homemaker), July 10, 1982 (divorced); married Julie Deborah Brown (executive director of a nonprofit organization), October 18, 2003; children: Sarah, Lilly. Education: Hampshire College, B.A., 1975. Politics: Democrat.

ADDRESSES: Home—Walpole, NH 03600. Offıce— Florentine Films, Maple Grove Rd., P.O. Box 613, Walpole, NH 03600.

CAREER: Producer, director, cinematographer, and writer. Maker of motion picture and television documentaries, including The Brooklyn Bridge, 1981; The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God, 1984; The Statue of Liberty, 1985; Huey Long, 1985; Thomas Hart Benton, 1988; The Congress, 1988; The Civil War, 1990; Lindbergh, 1990; Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio, 1991; The Songs of the Civil War, 1992; Baseball (miniseries), 1994; Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery, 1997; Frank Lloyd Wright, 1998; Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, 1999; Jazz (miniseries), 2001; Mark Twain, 2002; and Horatio's Drive: America's First Road Trip, 2003. Television appearances include Public Television: Public Debate with Charlie Rose, Public Broadcasting System (PBS), 1992. Cofounder, Florentine Films. Member of board of trustees, New Hampshire Humanities Council; member of board of directors, MacDowell Colony; trustee, Hampshire College; member of professional council, New School of Design.

MEMBER: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Society of American Historians, American Antiquarian Society, Massachusetts Historical Society, Walpole Society for Bringing to Justice Horse Thieves and Pilferers.

AWARDS, HONORS: Academy Award nomination, best documentary, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 1981, for The Brooklyn Bridge; Christopher Award, 1983; Erik Barnouw Award, Organization of American Historians; American Film Festival Blue Ribbon; CINE Golden Eagle Award; CINE Golden Eagle Award, 1984, and American Film Festival Blue Ribbon, both for The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God; Academy Award nomination, best documentary, 1986; Emmy Award nomination, outstanding informational special, Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, and American Film Festival Blue Ribbon, both 1986, Christopher Award, Special Award, Sinking Creek, and CINE Golden Eagle Award, all 1987, all for The Statue of Liberty; American Film Festival Red Ribbon, 1986, Outstanding Feature, Sinking Creek, 1987, and Silver Baton, Dupont-Columbia Journalism Awards Festival, CINE Golden Eagle Award, and Erik Barnouw Award, all 1988, all for Huey Long; CINE Golden Eagle Award, 1988, and American Film Festival Blue Ribbon, Golden Apple Award, National Educational Film Festival, and first prize, Baltimore Film Competition, all 1989, all for Thomas Hart Benton; CINE Golden Eagle Award, Silver Apple Award, National Educational Film Festival, and American Film Festival Red Ribbon, all 1989, all for The Congress; George Foster Peabody Broadcasting Award, CINE Golden Eagle Award, Dartmouth Film Award, and Producer of the Year designation, Producer's Guild of America, all 1990, best television miniseries, National Board of Review, Emmy awards for outstanding informational series, and outstanding individual achievement—writing, Christopher Award for best film script, Lincoln Prize, Gettysburg College, Bell I. Wiley Award, Civil War Round Table, Charles Frankel Prize, National Endowment for the Humanities, Gabriel Award, UNDA-USA National Catholic Association of Broadcasters and Communicators, Silver Apple Award, Award of Merit, American Association for State and Local History, Daughters of the American Revolution Annual Award, Golden Angel Award for best television miniseries, Humanitas Prize, Human Family Educational and Cultural Institute, American Film and Video Festival Blue Ribbon, and People's Choice Award for best miniseries, all 1991, Silver Baton, Dupont-Columbia Awards Festival, Sol Taishoff Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism, National Press Foundation, Ohio State Award, British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award, and National Association of Television Program Executives International Educational Foundation Award, all 1992, Clarion Award, Women in Communications Inc., Annual Achievement Award, Association for Educational Communications Technology, D. W. Griffith Award, Directors Guild of America, Lamplighter Award, Educational Press Association, and best special designation, Television Critics Association, all for The Civil War; Emmy Award nomination, CINE Golden Eagle Award, American Film and Video Festival Blue Ribbon, all for Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio. Honorary degrees include L.H.D., University of New Hampshire; Litt.D., Notre Dame College (Manchester, NH); D.F.A., Franklin Pierce College; D.H., College of St. Joseph; Litt.D., Amherst College; L.H.D., Springfield College of Illinois; L.H.D., Pace University; L.H.D., Bowdoin College.

WRITINGS:

FILM AND TELEVISION SCRIPTS

(Also producer and director) The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God (also see below), 1984, broadcast on Public Broadcasting System (PBS), 1985.

(With Geoffrey C. Ward; also producer and director) Huey Long, RKB, 1985, broadcast on PBS, 1986.

(With Geoffrey C. Ward and Ric Burns; also producer, director, and photographer) The Civil War (also see below), 1990, broadcast on PBS, 1990.

(With Geoffrey C. Ward; also producer and director) Baseball (also see below), broadcast on PBS, 1994.

(Producer) The West, broadcast by PBS, 1996.

(With Geoffrey C. Ward; also producer with Camilla Rockwell and director) Thomas Jefferson, broadcast on PBS, 1997.

Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery, broadcast on PBS, 1997.

BOOKS

(With wife, Amy Stechler Burns) The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God: The History and Visions of the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing from 1774 to the Present (companion volume to film), Portland House (New York, NY), 1987.

(With Geoffrey C. Ward and Ric Burns) The Civil War: An Illustrated History (companion guide to television series), Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 1990.

(With Geoffrey C. Ward) Baseball: An Illustrated History, Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 1994.

(Coauthor, with Geoffrey C. Ward) Who Invented the Game?, Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 1994.

(Coauthor, with Geoffrey C. Ward) Shadow Ball: The History of the Negro Leagues, Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 1994.

(Coauthor, with Geoffrey C. Ward) Twenty-five Great Moments, Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 1994.

The People, Yes, Aperture (New York, NY), 1995.

(Coauthor, with Geoffrey C. Ward) Jazz: A History of America's Music, Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 2000.

(With Dayton Duncan and Geoffrey C. Ward) Mark Twain: An Illustrated Biography, Knopf (New York, NY), 2002.

(And Dayton Duncan) Horatio's Drive: America's First Road Trip (audio book), Books on Tape, 2003.

Contributor to books, including Centennial, Pindar Press (London, England), 1986.

SIDELIGHTS: Ken Burns was already a respected creator of documentaries, having produced films on subjects such as the Statue of Liberty and flamboyant Louisiana governor Huey Long, when his 1990 public television series The Civil War began drawing huge audiences and rave reviews from critics. He has continued his reputation for producing heavily "illustrated" films that reflect the panorama of American culture and history with more recent projects, including his highly publicized Baseball and Jazz, both of which gained the status of cultural events as hundreds of thousands of American television viewers tuned in over several evenings to watch these ongoing series, and expanded their participation through discussions. As Steven F. Pond explained in Notes regarding Burns' 2001 film Jazz: "The film's ten episodes (nineteen hours of film) were broadcast on the PBS network over four weeks, with an estimated thirteen million viewers on the first day alone." According to Pond, the film, and the resulting discussion about the film on the Web and in print and television media created renewed academic interest in jazz music, boosted interest in jazz musicians, and brought a host of new books, recordings, and other materials into publication, including Burns's own Jazz: A History of America's Music.

Burns got the idea to do a film about the U.S. Civil War while talking to his grandmother in 1984. She recalled for him that people had still harbored strong feelings about the war during her childhood. He confided to Marjorie Rosen and Stephen Sawicki in People: "I realized the power that the Civil War still exerted over us." Burns spent the next five years laboring on The Civil War. Told through the words of featured historian Shelby Foote, The Civil War explains how the conflict changed the way the United States viewed itself as a nation. Washington Post contributor Tom Shales quoted Foote as saying that before the war, people spoke of the United States in the plural: "'The United States are. . . .' After the war, it became 'The United States is. . . .'"

With his collaborators—Geoffrey C. Ward and Burns's younger brother Ric—Burns put together eleven hours on the war, which occurred between 1861 and 1865. He relied only on authentic paintings and still photographs from the era, interviews with noted Civil War historians such as Shelby Foote, and present-day film of some of the battle sites, often taken in the same season and at the same time of day as when battles occurred. Burns used no historical reenactments, as have most previous films about the conflict. Despite the length of the documentary, The Civil War held public television viewers riveted to their sets for the five straight days of its initial 1990 broadcast. As Shales opined in the Washington Post, "from a cataclysmic national ordeal, Burns has made a grippingly powerful film about who we were, who we are, and who we yet may be." In addition to directing, producing, and doing camera work on The Civil War, Burns also aided his brother and Ward in writing the script and helped prepare the book version that was published in conjunction with the film.

Critics, including Harry F. Waters in Newsweek, marveled over Burns's ability to make such a fascinating documentary about a war without including genuine film footage of battles (the motion picture camera was yet to be invented at the time of the conflict). Waters declared The Civil War "a kind of video miracle," explaining that "without access to a single frame of battle footage, without resort to hokey reenactments or docudrama inventions, it takes the nation's most cataclysmic act of self-definition and brings it hauntingly and wondrously alive." He did, however, use footage from reunions of Civil War soldiers taken during the early 1900s. Burns also scored the film with period music—making the plaintive "Ashokan Farewell" recognizable to many Americans in the process. To provide much of the narrative, he recruited a cast of famous actors and other notables to read from diaries and letters of the Civil War era. Sam Waterston provided the voice of Abraham Lincoln, Morgan Freeman that of Frederick Douglass, Arthur Miller that of William Tecumseh Sherman, and Jason Robards that of Ulysses S. Grant. But for the backbone of this kind of narrative, Burns and his collaborators relied on the diaries of two regular soldiers—Elisha Hunt Rhodes for the Union and Sam Watkins for the Confederacy. One of the documentary's most touching moments comes when a farewell love letter from Major Sullivan Ballou to his wife is read.

Shales strongly praised Burns's ability to put all of his sources together into a cohesive and gripping whole: "It is no small talent simply to know how long to leave a picture on the screen. Burns is nearly unerring at this, and at orchestrating voices, music, sound effects—and even dead silence, as during a brief sequence on embalming in Episode 6." Shales also lauded Burns for his content choices, including discussion of the roles of women and African Americans during the war. He and other reviewers noted the relevancy of the Civil War to more modern times; parallels have been drawn with the Vietnam War, especially between pioneering photographer Matthew Brady's pictures of battle carnage and the bloody footage of Vietnam shown on the nightly news during the late 1960s.

Burns and his collaborators also received acclaim for the book version of The Civil War: An Illustrated History, published in 1990. In its pages are reproduced many of the pictorial images of the film—what Herbert Mitgang listed in the New York Times as "photographs, paintings, lithographs, sketches and particularly clear battle maps"—in addition to text based on the film script and essays by five Civil War experts. Mitgang called the volume "the most sophisticated and masterly illustrated history of [the Civil War] to come along in years." While noting the book's origins in the television documentary, David Haward Bain, in the New York Times Book Review, asserted that it "easily stands on its own," and lauded it as "superbly designed." Paul Hubbard, in National Review, even went as far as to declare that "powerful and haunting as the TV series was, it cannot fully substitute for the book version," because "here one can pore over the illustrations and note every detail, gaze into the thousands of faces and ponder the thoughts and fears they reflect, read and reread the poignant letters written by soldiers and their loved ones." Similarly, in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, critic Huston Horn concluded that the work's appeal "is not just the 500 photographs . . . nor the pastoral battlefield paintings . . . nor the soldiers' campground drawings. It is not just the rending (and risible) selections from diaries and letters and reminiscences. . . . It is the combining of these several things with such graceful, affecting prose as is not commonly found in history books. Consequently, the battlefields do not seem remote, the horrible significance is not lost amid the jumble of type; the funeral is almost palpably upon one's own threshold."

As if this effort was not enough, Burns simultaneously worked on the film The Civil War as well as documentaries about artist Thomas Hart Benton and the history of the U.S. Congress. For much of the five years, he spent time away from his family working fifteen hours a day in a one-room apartment. He recalled for Elizabeth Kastor in the Washington Post: "I literally don't remember the last months of 'Benton.' What I didn't have in my life was my family. What I didn't have was a social life. What I didn't have was anything other than this film."

One of Burns's better-known documentary projects prior to his film about the Civil War was Huey Long. As he had before and would again, Burns worked with Ward as script writer on this film about the corrupt but colorful political demagogue. The volume chronicled its subject's service during the Great Depression as governor of Louisiana and then as a U.S. senator before his assassination in 1935. Vincent Canby, reviewing Huey Long for the New York Times, declared that "Burns has created a remarkably comprehensive portrait of a man, a time and a place by using old newsreel footage [and] a series of especially revealing contemporary interviews." The critic went on to call Huey Long a "meticulously researched, graceful, funny and disturbing film."

In Baseball, Burns chronicles the more than 150 years of the sport in nine two-hour parts—"innings"—each beginning with "The Star-Spangled Banner." The series features sketches of baseball notables, including Negro League players, anecdotes, photographs, and pertinent music, including 250 versions of "Take Me out to the Ball Game." Newsweek critic Harry F. Waters stated that Baseball "teems with portrait-quality profiles of the game's gods, dunces and scoundrels, each illuminated with small, surprising touches." Although Waters praised the series' photography, he thought that "the writing in Baseball rarely soars and, at its worst, drifts between the banal and the overripe." Variety critic Jeff Silverman faulted the series for its overwhelming scope. He wrote: "Baseball, in the end, [is] a difficult documentary to stay with. It's long, and its length is taxing. Its pace, at times, is slower than a bad ball game. Its comprehensiveness is numbing."

In 1996, the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) aired The West, which Burns produced and Stephen Ives directed. Just as his brother, Ric Burns, did a year earlier in his documentary The Way West, Burns interprets settlement of the western United States in The West. The stories of conquistadors, Native Americans, pioneers, and entrepreneurs are told through photographs, diaries, letters, and other archival documents. However, the same style that won Burns praise for his other documentaries brought some criticism to this work. In Time, Richard Zoglin called the style "formulaic," although he credited the documentary for its "evenhandedness" and for tackling "complexities." Silverman lamented: "With The West, the Burns formula has finally taken over—overtaken, actually—the storytelling." He concluded: "In the end, despite the wealth of information, the magnificent photography of nature, the faces that manage to emerge, and the themes that are mined, The West never manages to cross the canyon into anything that feels new and different." Steven Goode, reviewing the series for Insight on the News, called it "visually splendid and unforgettable." Although he also called it uneven and declared it "falls flat" when it strays from the powerful and poignant personal stories and turns, instead, to the didactic, "lecturing white Americans about shortcomings shared by all humans, including American Indians," he praised the series overall. He noted that the story of the West has been documented and filmed prolifically, but here it is "is presented in new and, quite often, mysterious and awesome ways. Every episode. . . . glows with footage of magnificent scenery. It's as though an eye as keen as Ansel Adams' controlled the camera. . . . Moreover, the nineteenth-century photographs and other images employed by the makers of this series . . . are better than first-rate," declared Goode.

When asked by Gregory Lalire in Wild West how the project got started, Burns answered in part: "I'm interested in making films about who we are as Americans. Each film asks the same question: Who are we? And when you are involved in that pursuit, you are constantly juggling, not just the projects you're doing but also all the possible projects that are there on the horizon. It would be foolish not to recognize that in addition to the Civil War, which was the defining moment in our history, that so much of who we are both mythically and factually takes place in the West."

Several of Burns' film projects have focused on individual Americans. In Thomas Jefferson, Burns and coproducer Camilla Rockwell provide a portrait of the dignitary from Jefferson's boyhood until his death. Despite "some factual errors . . . annoying visual mistakes, [and] sentimental passages that detract from a fuller understanding of the political events, especially during Jefferson's presidency," Sean Wilentz maintained in the New Republic that "Burns's effort is historically on the mark about most of the important themes, including Jefferson and slavery." New York reviewer Alma Martyrs characterized the documentary as "a dreamy essay on the aristocrat who became a revolutionary."

America's most beloved humorist comes in for the full Burns treatment in Mark Twain: An Illustrated Biography, which was written to accompany the four-hour 2001 film. Praised by a Publishers Weekly contributor for the "magificent archival detective work" that collected the book's "treasure trove of rare Twain photographs," Burns' volume presents scholars and general readers alike with "a fascinating account of Twain's extraordinary career." Noting that the book presents "the arc of Twain's life" with "sweeping flourishes of fact supplemented by intimate details of his home and family life," a Kirkus Reviews critic noted that the volume is enhanced by essays by Russell Banks, Hal Holbrook, Ron Powers, and Jocelyn Chadwick.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Insight on the News, September 30, 1996, Steven Goode, review of The West, p. 42.

Kirkus Reviews, September 15, 2001, review of Mark Twain: An Illustrated Biography, p. 1346.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 23, 1990, Huston Horn, review of The Civil War: An Illustrated History.

National Review, December 17, 1990, Paul Hubbard, review of The Civil War, p. 51.

New Republic, March 10, 1997, Sean Wilentz, review of Thomas Jefferson, p. 32.

Newsweek, September 17, 1990, pp. 68-70; September 12, 1994; September 23, 1996, Harry F. Waters, "Baseball Is Forever," p. 66.

New York, February 14, 1997, Alma Martyrs, review of Thomas Jefferson, p. 129.

New York Times, September 28, 1985, Vincent Canby, review of Huey Long; September 5, 1990, Herbert Mitgang, "Making the Civil War Real in Pictures and Essays," p. C16.

New York Times Book Review, September 9, 1990, David Haward Bain, review of The Civil War, p. 26.

Notes, September, 2003, Stephen F. Pond, review of Jazz, p. 11.

People, September 24, 1990, Marjorie Rosen and Stephen Sawicki, "Battling Fatigue, Lonely Nights, and the Specter of Defeat, Filmmaker Ken Burns Brings The Civil War to PBS," p. 95.

Publishers Weekly, October 8, 2001, review of Mark Twain, p. 57.

Time, September 12, 1994, p. 77; September 16, 1996, Richard Zoglin, "White Men Behaving Badly," p. 76.

Variety, September 12, 1994, p. 26; September 16-22, 1996, p. 46; February 17-23, 1997, p. 49.

Washington Post, September 23, 1990, Tom Shales, "The Civil War Drama: TV Preview: The Heroic Retelling of a Nation's Agony," and Elizabeth Kastor, "The Civil War Drama: For Filmmaker Ken Burns, the Culmination of a Five-Year Crusade", section G, pp. 1, 5, 10-11.

Wild West, October, 1996, Gregory Lalire, interview with Kenneth Burns and Steven Ives, p. 42.

ONLINE

Florentine Films Web site, http://www.florentinefilms.com/ (August 14, 2004).*